March 2014

Nearly three years ago, in the immediate wake of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, the Washington Post published a dispatch from its Tokyo correspondent Chico Harlan, reporting that Japan had turned to renewables:

A new energy policy, which Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan began to outline this week, would emphasize solar and wind power and require pricey investment and yet-to-be-determined innovation…Although the prime minister has set new [and ultra-aggressive renewable] energy targets, he has yet to give specifics of how those goals will be reached…”

I made light of the report, in particular the part about how the Prime Minister’s plan was based on an “as-yet-to-be-determined” innovation, which struck me as wishful thinking. At the time—May 29th, 2011, to be exact—I predicted that reality would intervene, and Japan would turn to coal to replace nuclear, because intermittent renewable energy simply cannot function as a base load power source. To be precise, I wrote,

When Japan starts building large plants, my bet is that they’ll be coal powered.

Nearly three years later, it’s come to pass. Below is the lede to an article from Friday morning’s Wall Street Journal

Japan is turning into a rare bright spot in the world coal market, stepping up coal-fired power generation to replace nuclear plants that went offline after the 2011 Fukushima accident.

Japan’s embrace of “dirty” coal, climate change notwithstanding, is a bow to reality. As I explained three years ago, renewables simply aren’t up to the challenge:

Electricity generation, generally speaking, falls into two categories: Base-load generation and peak generation. Basically, there’s a relatively stable “base”-line demand for electricity throughout the day, which is supplied by “base load” generation. From 4-6PM, when most people come home from work and turn on their air conditioners, televisions, and laptops, there is a spike, or “peak,” in electricity demand. Base load generation is met at the lowest cost by large power plants running at a high efficiency, like coal, nuclear, and hydro. Peak power is best supplied by natural gas power plants that can be ramped up and down most quickly and efficiently, although hydro is good for this, too, because the energy is stored [mechanically] and can be dispatched fast. Renewable energy, like wind and solar, is unreliable, so it’s good for nothing.

I was being cheeky when I said green energy is “good for nothing”; in fact, wind and solar power do produce energy, however inefficiently, and this energy does have value. Nonetheless, it’s true that wind and solar have next-to-no applicability as a base load source, due to the simple fact that a base load source MUST be highly reliable, which, again, is inherently untrue of wind and solar. To be sure, it’s possible we’ll have a breakthrough in battery technology. But we’re nowhere near that now, evidently, and until energy storage is commercialized, it remains true that renewable energy can’t replace conventional energy sources for base load. Because of this reality, Japan turned to coal.

Last Saturday, from 8:30-9:30 PM, I and thousands others joined my colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute to celebrate Human Achievement Hour. The holiday is both a tribute to the human innovations that have allowed people around the globe to live better, fuller lives, and also a defense the basic human right to use energy to improve the quality of life of all people. To be precise, Human Achievement Hour is a cheerful response to the depressing alarmism of modern environmentalism. The gloomy greens propagate a message that virtually all economic development is evil, because it necessarily despoils pristine ecology. By celebrating Human Achievement Hour, we give ascendancy to mankind, and readily recognize that the surest path to both human and environmental well-being is wealth creation, fossil-fuel production, transportation, refinement, and consumption included.

In fact, Human Achievement Hour isn’t the only holiday observed on Saturday night, from 8:30 to 9:30 PM. Contemporaneously, the World Wide Fund for Nature sponsors Earth Hour whereby participants symbolically renounce the environmental impacts of modern technology by turning off their lights.

While Earth Hour supporters may suggest rolling brown-outs in India are desirable, we respectfully disagree. Reliable electricity is one human achievement people can celebrate. To this end, we advocated that people take part in Human Achievement Hour by keeping their lights on for one hour.

To learn more about Human Achievement Hour, see here or here. Below, I spoke about the holiday with Ezra Levant of Sun News.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) confirmed Wednesday that China’s policies restricting exports of rare-earth minerals violate global trade rules. According to the Wall Street Journal:

The WTO said China’s export duties on rare-earth metals, molybdenum and tungsten are inconsistent with its obligations in the organization. It also ruled against Beijing’s export quotas on the materials and its move to restrict their trade.

China has said the restrictions are in place for reasons of environmental protection. The WTO ruling says those aren’t valid reasons for limiting exports.

The WTO ruling casts doubt on the legality of the current process for approving exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG). By compelling aspiring exporters to run a long and unpredictable bureaucratic and political gauntlet, the existing process informally but effectively constrains gas exports.

More importantly, in light of the WTO ruling, the quantitative restrictions on LNG exports advocated by Dow Chemical, America’s Energy Advantage (AEA), and the American Public Gas Association (APGA) are plainly illegal.

On Tuesday, the House Energy & Commerce Committee heard testimony on trade law and LNG exports from former congressman James Bacchus (D-Fla.), who now chairs the Global Practice at GreenbergTraurig.

The hearing was on H.R. 6, the Domestic Prosperity and Global Freedom Act, introduced by Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.). H.R. 6 would amend the 1938 Natural Gas Act to provide that applications to export LNG to any WTO-member country be “granted without modification or delay.”

Witnesses debated whether H.R. 6 would help or harm U.S. manufacturers and consumers, and whether the legislation would undermine Russia’s monopoly power to coerce Ukraine and other countries dependent on Russia for most or all of their gas.

A future post may examine the back-and-forth on those issues. Here I’m going to excerpt passages from Bacchus’s testimony and offer some brief comments. Bacchus’s remarks are indented in blue.

Largely overlooked so far in the emerging Congressional debate about restricting exports of natural gas is the possibility that such restrictions are inconsistent with the obligations of the United States to other WTO Members under the WTO treaty. If our restrictive energy measures are inconsistent with our treaty obligations, the United States risks losing a case in the WTO. Such a loss could cause the WTO to authorize expensive economic sanctions against us through the loss of previously granted concessions in other sectors of our international trade.

Comment: It’s not surprising proponents of LNG export restrictions ignore the incompatibility of their agenda with global trade rules. They also ignore the incompatibility of their agenda with property rights and the constitutional principle of equality under law. Even though Dow, AEA, and APGA didn’t invest a dime to find and produce the gas, they fancy themselves entitled to determine who gets to buy the gas and at what price. [click to continue…]

How many times have you heard climate activists claim skeptics are just latter-day “tobacco scientists?” Google “tobacco scientists” and “global warming,” and you’ll get about 1,110,000 results. With so much (ahem) smoke, surely there must be some fire, right?

Al Gore helped popularize this endlessly repeated allegation. In An Inconvenient Truth (p. 263), he contends that just as tobacco companies cynically funded corrupt scientists to cast doubt on the Surgeon General’s report linking cigarette smoking to cancer, so fossil fuel companies fund “skeptics” to create the appearance of scientific controversy where none exists.

Here’s the pertinent passage:

The misconception that there is serious disagreement among scientists about global warming is actually an illusion that has been deliberately fostered by a relatively small but extremely well-funded cadre of special interests, including Exxon Mobil and a few other oil, coal, and utilities companies. These companies want to prevent any new policies that would interfere with their current business plans that rely on the massive unrestrained dumping of global warming pollution into the Earth’s atmosphere every hour of every day.

One of the internal memos prepared by this group to guide the employees they hired to run their disinformation campaign was discovered by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ross Gelbspan. Here was the group’s stated objective: to “reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact.”

This technique has been used before. The tobacco industry, 40 years ago, reacted to the historic Surgeon General’s report linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer and other lung diseases by organizing a similar disinformation campaign. 

One of their memos, prepared in the 1960s, was recently uncovered during one of the lawsuits against the tobacco companies in behalf of the millions of people who have been killed by their product. It is interesting to read it 40 years later in the context of the global warming campaign:

“Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing controversy.” Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company memo, 1960s

There’s just one problem with this tale of corruption and intrigue — much of it is false and all of it is misleading. Let’s examine the flaws in this urban legend, going from minor to major.

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